Category: Military History

The 26th’s provider spanned 3 years and 3 theaters of struggle. The “Sigel Regiment,” named after German common Franz Sigel, was once at the start absorbed into the military of the Potomac, and connected to the 2d Brigade, third department, Howard’s eleventh military Corps. Its bloody battlefield debut came about at Chancellorsville on may perhaps 2, 1863, the place the Wisconsin infantrymen came upon themselves at the receiving finish of 1 of the main winning shock assaults in army background. Outnumbered, outflanked, and stuck in a crossfire, the struggling with regiment and its Colonel William Jacobs refused to fall again earlier than the onslaught till two times ordered to take action. comparable ill-luck months later ensconced the regiment north of Gettysburg, the place the Badger country troops, this time lower than Lt. Col. Hans Boebel, left one other 250 males at the box. by the point the twenty sixth Wisconsin shipped out that fall for carrier within the Western Theater, hardened strive against veterans who had visible the worst warfare has to supply populated its ranks.

Service in Tennessee with the military of the Cumberland lessened the regiment’s publicity to not easy wrestle merely quickly. harassed with political strife and dealing with a chilly wintry weather, the Wisconsin males marched and skirmished their manner during the fall and early wintry weather campaigns of Chattanooga and Knoxville. The spring of 1864 introduced with it one other season of bloodshed while basic William T. Sherman decided to force deep into Georgia and trap Atlanta. battling now as a part of the 20 th Corps, the twenty sixth Wisconsin distinctive itself on a few fields, together with Resaca, New wish Church, Kennesaw Mountain, and Peach Tree Creek. The thinning German regiment completed a different contrast at Peach Tree Creek via taking pictures the flag of the thirty third Mississippi Infantry. After the autumn of Atlanta, the boys of the twenty sixth tramped to Savannah at the March to the ocean, and north into the Carolinas, the place extra not easy battling at Averasboro and Bentonville awaited them. via the top of the conflict, 1,089 males had served within the 26th’s ranks; greater than 17% have been killed or mortally wounded.

Pula’s gracefully written and fantastically researched The Sigel Regiment: A historical past of the twenty sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, 1862-1865, is a uncommon examine of a scuffling with ethnic regiment.